Knowing where you're going

I feel I don't want to go into my imminent trip too much but I want to present it as a continuing background while still honouring the artist in her unhesitatingly impressive journey of her own towards exhibition. Today for example I walked with her into perhaps the largest and best art supply store in the capital and watched as she strolled the upper floor sniffing approvingly at the various materials, admiring without reproach the beautiful wooden boxes filled with small tubes of paint, and reminiscing before paying at the till about the crayons she would be given each year as a child. I must admit, she looked attractively accomplished as she dealt with the transaction. The surfaces were largely stainless steel and at one point I could see this warped reflection of the artist staring straight back at me. To her left meanwhile was a large table of art magazines. I had leafed through some of them earlier and there was not much within their glossy and advertising-led pages to catch my eye, which is not to say an absence of the artist's images within such pages is a cause for bitterness. How could it be? Only now is the artist feeling ready to step forward. But that image of the artist, that shiny warp, reinterpreted by the stainless steel, is clear in my head now. More than any of the pages of the magazines. It is the delightful image of someone going somewhere.

Different Flowers from the Same Garden

I am writing this early as I have an important and emotional reunion a few hundred miles away, and I will not have time to write this later. (As a result, there is also one more entry before this that you may not have read.) Anyway, I have risen early in preparation for this trip. It was still dark as I lumbered across the main road in my running kit past the unfinished roadworks. (I am not a natural jogger but do it because I know that it is good for me.) Once I had connected my breathing to the rhythm of my running I was fine. Thoughts. The space you inhabit when you run is a great place for thoughts. For about eight years as a schoolboy I ran every morning, through wind, sleet, rain, and snow, and I don't believe it ever quite leaves you, this feeling that you should be running at the break of each day. At one moment, steam rose from a building's hot water system to my right. I was thinking about my five sisters whom I will be meeting later today. We are coming together in the heart of the country - in the former capital for our illustrious ancestors from across the choppy seas, in fact. It will be a poignant reunion. It always is but this one will be more poignant than ever. One of our six (five plus one) is dying. We are talking months not years. For as long as I can remember there have been no parents around - those whom the gods love die young - so the whole procedure will have its characteristic rudderlessness, though it will be bound with affection. I am the only male and the youngest and have tried hard at times, I like to think, to bunch us together. (I make it sound like flowers in a vase.) When you come at something like this from as abstract a beginning as my own you also experience a kind of alarming clarity about what families really are. When, if you like, any kind of unconditional familial protocol is not in place, only one's wits can take over. The love is secure all right: it just isn't grounded. When you have your own family however, and I am only just beginning to grasp this, it is almost as if the slate is wiped clean, and everything, including the hope, respect, and love you have anyway, is fresh again. No, it will be quite something, something very tender I suspect, seeing my five sisters again, especially as most of our attention will be directed towards the sickest in our ranks. The truth is, I am not very close to my sisters. But I have, in my own way, looked out for them, kept a quiet eye on them, all my life.

One should never know too precisely whom one has married *

Being the artist’s husband is not the only hat I wear. During the course of a day such as today I am in fact many people. One thing I hadn’t expected to be today however was the recipient of two separate phone calls from two different people, both of whom I know very well, and both of whom I introduced to the other several years ago. I discovered later that they were phoning to inform me that they were about to get married. To each other. On Friday. (Amazing.) I remember when I first introduced them. I can even remember warning the man with a smile to do no wrong. I don’t remember thinking in the course of the introduction of what I should have thought, which is that every such moment is loaded, every such event can lead to something profound, and that no matter what I say to either of them, we are in the deep and rolling laps of the gods. Now, of course, I wonder with another smile: What have I done? Actually, matchmaking is far too grand a title for what I have done, but I have acted as a kind of joy-enabler. Yep. Joy-enabler. That’s the word. I wonder if they knew when they first set eyes on each other that further down the road they would be marrying in arguably the most famous registry office in the capital, where everyone from Judy Garland to Patrick Veira has been tied. And what exactly happens, I still wonder, when two people meet like that and two previous futures become one? Is it – can we make that leap? - like seeing great art? (I remember my first glimpse of Michelangelo's’s Pieta at St Peter’s: that was like falling in love.) Or is it like brushing away a fly, only to discover it was a bee, and that the bee has in fact stung you? (No, I’ll stick to the art analogy.) Kiefer does it for me. Clemente. Rothko. Beuys. It’s funny: it’s always the spiritual ones. Anyway, as I was saying, there were these other hats to wear in the course of the day. I was checking to see if there was news on a wonderful book project I’d really like to do. I was in touch with someone else about the war-zone: some facts I needed confirmed. I was firing off messages on items relating to earlier conversations about film. I was pondering calling the (literary) agent. But each time I went off on one of these largely work-related tangents, I kept coming back to this startling image of my two friends getting hitched. OK, it’s not completely out of the blue. But it is still remarkable. I was telling the artist about it. I was trying to explain how good it was they were getting married. Deep down, I was trying to explain the importance of marriage. I forgot for a moment about us. How funny is that?
*Friedrich Nietzsche

Live with intention. Walk to the edge.

It is night and I have just walked up a large hill. The sky was a kind of muddy purple and the trees lining the road gave off a whiff of summer. I was with a friend and we were admiring both the buildings and the people in them. A couple we passed in one house were sitting on their large sofa as if gleefully awaiting anyone who passed. They each had I think a glass in their hand. Furthermore he was bare chested and she was wearing what looked at a glance like a fluorescent pink tutu, though again we were walking pretty fast, even if the windows were studiously uncurtained and tailored for people like us. I suppose they were making an exhibition of themselves. Anyway, we passed a larger building which once had been a gallery and I remembered being there with the artist one Saturday or Sunday before we had children. Now it stood like an effigy of its former self, closed but lit. We continued and the scent in the air was evocative of so many things. Rome. Lahore. Sekondi-Takoradi. Savannah. I think it was the sense of people already in their beds which encouraged this voyeuristic respect, and I remember thinking as we crossed the road that I should look upon this walk later as reportable. As we reached a fork in the road I bade goodbye to my friend and we wished our families well and I continued my way up to the artist. On the last stretch I walked down a long and half-lit path for pedestrians only and saw at the far end a brief burst of flame which flickered and eventually disappeared. As I walked on I began to realise what it was and passed the person halfway. The person in question had obviously been lighting a huge joint as I was now walking straight through a thick cloud of smoke and I think I was still coughing when I arrived home and greeted the artist. She, bless, had just finished working.